


Welcome home

by Saetha



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Afterlife, Fluff, Halls of the Maker, M/M, no seriously this is actually really sweet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-13
Updated: 2014-08-13
Packaged: 2018-02-13 01:46:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2132484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saetha/pseuds/Saetha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At the end of his long life, Dwalin finally dies. At the Halls of the Maker his family awaits him, and, of course, his One.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Welcome home

**Author's Note:**

> Something short that I thought of when travelling the other day, just before I'm leaving again. Writing those two is kinda like therapy, no matter the shit and stress going on it just makes you happy :').

Dying, Dwalin thought, was different than he had imagined. He didn’t quite know what he had expected – pain perhaps, a blinding white light or all-encompassing darkness accompanied by a sudden change in his perception.

Instead, there was nothing.

A nothing that engulfed his entire self and scattered his being like snowflakes in the wind. He was a single grain of rock buried deep inside a mountain, a beam of sunlight in the sky, a thread in the fabric of the world. Rising and falling at the same time. Whole. Alone. Full. Empty.

When he jolted awake again, the world around him seemed to be intent to slip out of focus and colour every time he concentrated on it. He felt strangely light, as if not only the years had fallen off him, but his entire body had vanished as well. Dwalin tried to take a breath and found that he couldn’t – there was no beating heart anymore, no lungs clamouring for air. For a moment panic settled in his chest and he struggled as his mind tried to cope with the fact that his body was dead.

“Easy, brother.”

A hand settled on his chest, feeling neither warm nor cold, but soothing all the same. Dwalin slowly calmed down again as the voice found its way into his mind. It filled him to the brim with wonder, even as his eyes struggled to make out the shape in front of him to confirm that his mind wasn’t playing any tricks on him.

“Balin?” he whispered, almost afraid to hear the answer.

“Yes.” Dwalin could hear the smile in his brother’s voice and finally the shadows in front of him cleared, showing him the Balin he had known for most of his life – kind, compassionate, but with a core of steel beneath the friendly surface. It wasn’t the broken dwarrow of his brother’s last years anymore so riddled by guilt and his mistakes that he had blindly charged into Moria with no thought to the folly of such a mission.

Dwalin drew himself up from the strangely warm stonen surface that he had been lying on and caught Balin into an embrace so firm it would have shattered an ordinary human’s bones, dead or no. The resulting sensation was strange – his brother still smelled the same, of parchment, ink and iron, and the feeling of his hands slowly patting his back was as reassuring as ever. However, it was as if an edge had been taken off everything, the one piece always anchoring them firmly to reality missing. The same was also true for Dwalin’s own body (naked, as he now belatedly noticed) – none of the aches that age had given him remained. He felt again like he had done during their time in the Blue Mountains, strong and ready to face whatever was coming his way. Dimly he realised that the Halls of their Maker restored their bodies to the time when they had been happiest. Both Balin and him looked like they had in the time when their settlements in Ered Luin had finally started to prosper under Thorin’s rule, when they had watched Fíli and Kíli growing up, carrying with them the hopes of their uncle and their entire line.

A second hand touched his shoulder and he turned around.

“ _Adad_.” His voice broke when he looked into the face of the dwarrow he hadn’t seen in so long. His last memory of him was that of a broken body on the blood-drenched ground of Azanulbizar.

Fundin laughed, the wonderful, deep sound that always seemed to come directly from his belly and that made Dwalin feel at home like nothing else he had ever heard. He found himself pressed against his father’s chest in a matter of moments, Fundin’s fists thumping his back. He was completely unashamed that his eyes were misting over and any other word he had thought about saying had died in his throat. All he could bring out was a broken sound.

The mist in his eyes thickened and turned into tears when two hands put a blanket onto his shoulders and softly started stroking his back. He had never cried much before, but the sound of a voice so familiar and missed with a fierce ache for so long undid him in a single moment.

“It’s alright, _inùdoy_. We’re here.”

Suddenly, Dwalin was twenty again, a young dwarfling who had just been frightened by the fact that a forge fire gone wild had almost singed off his eyebrows and destroyed a part of his mother’s clothes. Varna’s arms felt as warm and secure as ever despite her lower height as she brought their foreheads together and then wrapped her arms around him as she had always done when he was little, stroking his hair and murmuring soothing words into the cloth draped around his shoulders.

It took Dwalin a long time to detach himself from his family again. There was no need to tell them what they already knew – that he had missed them terribly and that the wounds their passings had left him with had never fully healed. He could still see the faint shadow of regret in Balin’s eyes for leaving him and the pain in his mother’s ones for parting from her family so long before her time. Others had now slowly approached as well – he could see his grandfathers’ faces and those of his grandmothers. His uncle Gróin and his wife Lís were there too and he knew his cousins couldn’t be far away either. Only one face was missing in the dwarrows surrounding him, no matter how hard he was looking for it.

“We’re so proud of you, my son,” Varna whispered, taking his face between her hands and smiling a sad little smile as she saw the shame reflected in her Dwalin’s eyes at her words. Fundin and Balin simultaneously put their hands on Dwalin’s shoulders to squeeze them firmly, knowing what was filling his thoughts as he averted their gazes and looked down the blanket he had slung around his waist now.

Varna’s smile grew as her thumbs carefully rubbed the clasps in his ears. Only now Dwalin realised that the clasp he had been wearing for the last one hundred and seventy years, the one he had made himself and that had once adorned Thorin’s right ear, was missing. His thoughts had shied away from even mentioning his name so far although he didn’t truly know why – maybe it was just a deep-seated fear that Thorin wouldn’t be here, that he had never forgiven either Dwalin or himself.

The warmth he saw in his mother’s eyes slowly began to break those fears.

“He’s here,” she said gently. “He has been waiting for you all this time.”

With her words, the dwarrows surrounding him stepped aside and suddenly, nothing else mattered.

Thorin was leaning against a column towards the back of the stonen room, a short distance apart from Dwalin’s family. He was watching them with a quiet smile on his face. If Dwalin were still breathing, his breath would have been stolen away at the sight. How could this be his king, his lover, his One? And how could it not be?

Thorin’s hair was a shade darker than it had been during their quest towards Erebor and with fewer silver strands in it. Warmth spread inside Dwalin when he realised that his One’s happiest time was the same as his own. Thorin was wearing a simple tunic of midnight blue and his hair was still falling in a mostly unruly mane around his shoulders, although Dwalin could recognise the Lady Sigvór’s hands in a few plaited strands on his head. The silver clasps on his ears, _both_ ears, were reflecting the light and with a small sting in his heart Dwalin noticed that there wasn’t a single shimmer of gold anywhere on the dwarrow in front of him.

The most remarkable thing, however, were his eyes. There was so much softness and love in them now and only a trace of the self-loathing, shame and guilt that had haunted him all his life, but especially in his last moments. Dwalin felt something heal at the sight, a ragged wound that had been bleeding inside his chest for one hundred and seventy years that was now finally closing. Memories he had been carrying around all this time and dreamed of so many nights were finally fading – memories of a broken king bleeding out on a cot in front of him, of a dented crown lying forlorn on the ground and of Thorin’s and his own guilt so heavy it was robbing him of his last breath.

Instead he was finally seeing Thorin as the king he should have been at the end of their quest, had fate and madness not ripped everything apart with their bloody hands.

Dwalin closed the distance between them with a few steps, his eyes drowning in a sight he hadn’t seen in far too long. He lifted his arm and stopped shortly before touching his One, a small part of himself still unsure whether all of this wasn’t just a dream and Thorin would simply dissolve into nothing again to leave him alone in the darkness of the night as he had done so many times before.

Thorin gently took Dwalin’s hand in his own and guided it to rest at the side of his face, allowing him to touch what been denied to them for so long. Then he brought their foreheads together, locking their gazes and smiling as he felt the slight tremble of Dwalin’s fingers.

“You’ve made me wait a long time, _kurdel_.” Mahal, Dwalin had missed his voice. The deep rumbling tone, so mighty in its anger and yet so loving in moments that belonged just to the two of them; a voice that could make mountains tremble and fill entire halls with the sound of its singing, but that could also whisper promises of love and protection to the only ears who would ever get to hear them.

“I’m sor-“ Dwalin’s answer was cut short by a finger on his lips.

“No.” Thorin’s gaze was earnest now, the blue in the depth of his eyes swirling.”I don’t begrudge you a single second of it and I could never be more grateful to the Maker than for granting you a long life when I so foolishly threw my family’s away. To see the glory of our home restored, its splendour defended once again in the face of darkness...no, I could not have asked nor wanted anything else from you.”

Dwalin wanted to reply, but somehow the words were stuck in his throat. Thorin gave him another smile, this time smaller but somehow filled with love to the brim. Then he drew him closer and kissed him. The sensation was somehow both more and less intense than what they had shared when they were alive - as if they were condensed to their essences now, not so much a touch of flesh on flesh, but their bare souls merging into one.

The biggest fear Dwalin had faced during the last decades of his life was that he had forgotten what his One had felt, smelled, tasted like. He had been afraid that all that he thought he remembered had been nothing but fabrications of his mind to fill in blanks in his memory. A hundred and seventy years were a long time, more enough to forget even the most important things.

He had been wrong.

It was exactly like he remembered.

Smoke and Iron, pine needles and the scent of old wood drying in the sun. Thorin’s hair under his fingers was as soft as always, the skin of his neck as Dwalin’s hand carefully slipped down still tender where it wasn’t broken by old scars. He smiled into the kiss, feeling Thorin answer with a smile of his own as they savoured each moment. All the feelings of a lifetime together and those of another one apart were finally reunited - anger and tenderness, pain and happiness, sadness and laughter all joining and put together in the way what was meant to be. They were One, just as they had always known they were.

It would take them a while to relearn each other, to bridge all of the distance that time had inevitably caused between them. They would also have to learn how to deal with the difference of sensation and perception that came with their existence beyond the borders of mortal life. However, they had decades, centuries to do so now. More than enough time for even the most thick-headed of dwarves.

Their fingers intertwined as they finally broke the kiss. Dwalin didn’t know whether he would ever let go of his One again, for he knew he wouldn’t be able to stand losing him a second time. Thorin told him that Fíli and Kíli were waiting, as were Dís and Frerin, all of them eager to welcome him to the Halls. Even when the rest of his family was chatting excitedly, talking to Dwalin about the wonders of the afterlife, he only had eyes for one dwarrow. Thorin noticed his gaze and smiled and his fingers squeezed Dwalin’s for a single moment.

Dwalin couldn’t help a smile of his own spread on his face at the sensation.

He was finally home.


End file.
